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The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd: review

The book builds on the true story of an abolitionist and the young “slave” she is given, against her wishes, for her birthday.

Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings, Viking, 369 Pages, $29.50.

Sue Monk Kidd

By Laura Eggertson

Wed., Jan. 22, 2014

More than a decade before Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the influential anti-slavery novel, a pair of sisters from Charleston, South Carolina wrote American Slavery As It Is and campaigned for emancipation, racial equality and women’s rights. In The Invention of Wings, gifted southerner Sue Monk Kidd has re-imagined one of the sister’s lives, twinned with that of the slave she received for her 11th birthday.

This is an extraordinary and moving story of urban slavery and the uneasy friendship between Sarah Grimke and Hetty (Handful), her unwanted “present.” The novel, by an author best known for The Secret Life of Bees, is both an unstinting look at “the peculiar institution” of slavery and a rich depiction of the lives of free women imprisoned by their own lack of rights.

Monk Kidd, who grew up in Sylvester, Georgia, is a product of both the segregated South and the Civil Rights’ movement. She remembers the terror of seeing the Ku Klux Klan on the street in her town, and graduated from the first integrated class in her high school. Her experiences have drawn her to write about racial themes because, she relates on her website at suemonkkidd.com, “they are a part of me.” Thankfully for her millions of readers, she has not let political correctness dissuade her from creating strong, African-American characters despite the fact she is white.

In fact, Monk Kidd has created compelling protagonists who stay with the reader long after the story is finished. Sarah strives to have her voice heard through a stutter — born of the trauma of witnessing a vicious flogging — and above the strictures designed to keep her in her place. She endures painful, thwarted romances before finding her vocation as a writer and lecturer on the abolition circuit. Handful, a talented seamstress and quilter, is emboldened by her mother Charlotte’s subversive small rebellions and becomes a trusted lieutenant in plotting a slave rebellion. Though Sarah is able to escape the stifling restrictions of Charleston for years at a time, Handful is trapped in the Grimke household, where she watches her mother suffer cruel punishments and where she is abused herself at the hands of Sarah’s mother.

Even before the gripping plot unfolded, Monk Kidd had hooked me with her evocative language. In the first paragraph, she has Hetty describe her mother Charlotte, saying “Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy.” This is only the first of the succinct, laden phrases Monk Kidd employs with the skill of a master writer.

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Monk Kidd has woven fact and fiction together, to maximum effect. Her goal is to create empathy in her readers, and she succeeds. The chilling descriptions of whippings, sentences to a work house for punishment, and separation of families are well-documented. The basic facts of Sarah Grimke’s life, and that of her younger sister Angelina, are known, and Monk Kidd uses them as a scaffold for the interior lives and relationships she creates. In real life, Sarah did receive 10-year-old Hetty to be her maid — a prospect that horrified the budding abolitionist. Although the child died soon after Sarah taught her (illegally) to read, Monk Kidd builds a life for the character and crafts her story around their relationships as well as the vast discrepancies in their lives.

The Secret Life of Bees was a runaway success made into a heart-warming movie, thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement as one of her Book Club selections. In December, Winfrey announced The Invention of Wings as an Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 choice. Although the former talk show host’s network does not carry the same clout as her show once did, her stamp of approval is certain to translate into a healthy readership for this book — deservedly so.

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